Posts Tagged ‘Valentina Imperi’

The first time that Valentina and I met in person was summer 2011 when I was in Rome looking for a flat. A mutual friend, Marco D’Amato introduced us via Facebook and we wrote to each other a little. Valentina was always very kind and helped me with ideas and suggestions. In September I moved to Rome but we didn’t see each other again in 2011, so it’s great that Valentina is one of the first people I’ve seen in 2012.

We arranged to meet at Termini. At first Valentina suggested a different bar, but she told me that it was probably closed on Monday mornings. We meet near to the Christmas tree on the station concourse. The bar which Valentina has chosen is near to the entrance of the metro and is called “Momento” – “It’s the place where I had coffee the first time I arrived in Rome with friends” she explains “and now, I always meet my friends in this bar when they come to visit me in Rome.” So it is a place full of good memories even if it is like all the station bars, a little impersonal and indifferent.

Sitting at the table, coffee and croissant for me and a cappuccino for Valentina, I immediately ask her why she decided to come and live in Rome – she’s originally from Vicenza. She looks at me with a big smile and says “because it’s the most beautiful city in the world” and you can see in her eyes that for her, this is true. She then tells me that it’s full of creative people, not just people who go to work every day, not like Vicenza where you are born, got to school, find a job, get married, have children and die. There are musicians, artists and writers – lots of creative people – and she hopes that in a city like this she can also find her creativity.

Infact, she is following a theatre course. This year she joined a small group of actors in order to continue this new found passion and soon (at the end of the month) she is taking part in a show with them. Next year she wants to do a creative writing course. Her creative world is opening.

We talk a bit about differences between Rome and the north of Italy and Vicenza. Rome is less humid and the sea is not far away (only 20 minutes by car) and then each quarter of Rome is like a small town… each one with its own shops, a bakery close to home, a market, a greengrocer on the corner. Obviously there are also things that don’t work in Rome… traffic especially. Although Valentina has a car here in Rome she uses it only to go out at night using the metro to go to work – she works for an Italian company.

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Great loves are sadistic and when you ask something,they don’t answer, or they answer with other questions.______________________________________________________

It would have been strange if we hadn’t talked about music. As I said before, we met through a mutual friend, Marco D’Amato, who is the singer of Mama.In.Inca, a group from Padova. She has a quote on Facebook from one of their songs entitled Mimi: “Great loves are sadistic and when you ask something, they don’t respond, or respond with other questions”, she tells me that this is really true for her. Lately she has gone to fewer concerts but she saw Mama.In.Inca at the beginning of December in Padova. Like me, Valentina has musical friends here in Rome. She tells me that she met these friends after her first months here: she saw that someone wanted a lift home after a concert and she offered to take him home. Then they went to Le Mura (a nice club in San Lorenzo) and the rest is history. She invites me to the concert of one of her friends, Jacopo Ratini.

We spend an hour together and quite probably I’ve forgotten many of the things we talked about. Maybe tomorrow, when I have my next breakfast, I should write notes otherwise I will forget everything. But, there’s one thing I won’t forget… Valentina’s promise that we’ll see each other more often this year and that she’ll take me to some of the beautiful places she’s discovered here in Rome.